Why do people think that Genealogy is a sure bet one afternoon thing, when to do research correctly one needs?

Hats off to you.. the number one question here seems to be..

I WANT MY FAMILY HISTORY, IT MUST BE FREE, AND I WANT ONE WEBSITE. WHERE IS THAT WEBSITE?

We try to be patient on this, since it comes from new persons.

An online family tree isn't a record of anything.

If someone has never tried to find a REAL DOCUMENT, then they won't understand why it is important, and HOW online trees can be wrong.

All genealogy is NOT going to be on the internet. That is not to slap what info IS out there, but I have seen people expecting their medical records to be on some site!!

Surnames are not genealogy. Everyone having the same name is not going to automatically be related. What is needed is A PERSON, and their actual connection to you.

Those who actually have HAD to go to libraries, courthouses, etc to find the information..KNOW that it takes energy, time, money. Whatever is online, got put there by someone, and it took their energy to post it. If/ when we find free stuff.. it is a bonus and gravy, to be appreciated. Not expected.

A lot of people do find what is really involved in research, and shrug their shoulders, and walk away. They only want it, if it is handed to them. They really lose on the challenge of finding the unknown, and what it feels like to find it.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Get a No Cost Background Check Scan at https://bitly.im/aO5UR

Its a sensible way to start. The site allows you to do a no cost scan simply to find out if any sort of data is in existence. A smaller analysis is done without cost. To get a detailed report its a modest payment.

You may not realize how many good reasons there are to try and find out more about the people around you. After all, whether you're talking about new friends, employees, doctors, caretakers for elderly family members, or even significant others, you, as a citizen, have a right to know whether the people you surround yourself with are who they say they are. This goes double in any situation that involves your children, which not only includes teachers and babysitters, but also scout masters, little league coaches and others. Bottom line, if you want to find out more about someone, you should perform a background check.

One needs to consider the plain facts: 34 generations ago, it would take 8,589,934,592 people to produce you. Since there are not that many people alive on earth today, that means that people married relatives!

If a person could research, catalog, imput the data for each ancestor in ONE SECOND, it would take 272.20 years, working 24 hours a day, to do the info for ancestors going back only 34 generations.

So, that means it is not a "one afternoon thing".

As to "proof of facts", please remember that, no matter the source, there is no 100% accurate source. "Official records" for my Mom, her Mom, and so many other ancestors is inaccurate. When all is said and done, "official records" are NOT the most accurate source for genealogy research.

Which means, whenever possible, a person should try to find information for each ancestor from more than one source.

Yes, not only do they think that their own personal history is all there waiting for them at the touch of a button they get quite indignant when they discover that doing genealogy costs money.

Everybody wants a tree going back to 1500 as well although once you get earlier than a few hundred years ago mostly all you get is a list of names and dates, where's the fun in that? I think it's far more interesting to 'put some meat on the bones' and find that your great grandpa was arrested for assault in 1880 than to know that John Smith was born 1524.

In England, we blame it on the BBC series "Who Do You Think You Are?". You probably have similar programmes across the pond. Each week they present some 'celebrity' with their ancestors but neglect to mention the hours of painstaking searching in archives and record offices that preceded these revelations.

Programmes like this have popularised family history so now everyone wants a family tree, regardless of their inclination or ability to do the actual research, evidenced by the many questions we get in this category from people who want to know their 'ancestory' (lol) and think we can give them the name of one free website where they will find it!

The internet has been a boon for information but family trees on the internet has caused a multiplication of errors. Too many people have heard someone say they found their family tree on the internet and everybody's is there!!!

Actually one website, Genealogy.Com, use to (dont' know if they still do) encourage people to merge other people's trees into theirs. That is nothing but sloppy genealogy.

Also a lot of people think it is important to see how many names they can get in their family tree rather than have a good verifiable family tree.

I will repeat a story that has happened to me.

One of my great great grandfathers had a son, grandson, brother and nephew named Zachariah Berry Jackson. I would like to make contact with family of the brother and nephew's line. So I put the name into Ancestry.Com one night and found the son of my great great grandfather(an uncle of my grandfather) had married his 2nd wife in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. This uncle was married 3 times as he had been widowed twice. The subscriber didn't have his first wife. You know for a farmer in Gonzales County, Texas to go to New Jersey in 1891 to marry her, she really had to be a prize. Of course, I already had a record of the marriage in Gonzales County.

Then I started checking the tree further and found that me, my sister and my brother-in-law all died. No date of death given but we died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. I found this information before Christmas 2008. Since the only time my sister and I were ever in New Jersey is when our family drove through it coming back from NY in 1957. Daddy did stop and get some gasoline there. Can you imagine we have been dead for over 51 years?

Then further checking and I found family on both sides that married and died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. Since a lot of my ancestry is southern American colonial and those immigrants that came after the country was founded came in through southern ports, this was quite a surprise!

If this family tree had been submitted to any of the other websites it would have been accepted.

If you disagree with something another subscriber has on your family, the website owners will tell you that that is between you and the other subscriber. You could make up an entirely fictitious family tree and it would be accepted. The subscriber with all the wrong info on my family had almost 150,000 names.

I know I read someone post on this board that Ancestry.Com will populate your famly tree for you!. They give you hints in your Public Member Tree and in One World Tree they will combine your informations and I have found twice where they combined 2 people into 1. But the information they have comes from another subscriber's family tree not from some expert working for the website. No way do I want a website or some unknown person populating my family tree. No way!

Ancestry.Com is great for the amount of original source records online. They can save people a lot of money traveling all over the country to courthouses and libraries. But some people are indignant that they don't provide that information for free!!! Can you imagine!!!

Laughing out loud, Georgie T! Great question!

My personal theory is that we have all gotten so used to (spoiled by) the myriad of information that is now available at our fingertips, all while we are at home in our pj's and fuzzy slippers, that we tend not to think what it really takes to gather information (not to mention transcribe and index it, and make it available real-time to anyone who thinks they want it)!

And maybe... just maybe... we all subconsciously think our roots are so important that surely SOMEone has already done the research for us!

people are gullible and there's money to be made by convincing people you can discern there genealogy with your clever software, and so the advertising campaigns begin.